


Scars

by sqbr



Series: Sal Shepard [3]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Fanfiction, Gen, Not Quite Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-28
Updated: 2012-05-05
Packaged: 2017-11-04 11:29:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/393313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sqbr/pseuds/sqbr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some things change, some things stay the same. Various moments from Mass Effect 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When Sal was ten she decided to see how far she could climb up the massive granary that stood on the edge of her parents farm. It was huge, like a tube covered monolith sillouhetted against the low dusty scrub and pale blue Mindoir sky, and every time she went past it she wondered what the view would look like from the top.

Her parents had always told her not to climb it, but while Sal tried to be an obedient child she valued her own judgement too much to let that prohibition stand in her way. She was a good climber, and it wasn't _that_ high, if she fell down she might break a bone but she probably wouldn't die. Her parents had grown up on Earth, and they were always forgetting how much lighter the gravity was here. 

Sal waited until a day when her father had taken their beat up old shuttle to the main settlement to buy supplies, he could never resist window shopping at the book store and could be relied on to be gone until late in the evening. She spent the whole day being as quiet and unobtrusive as possible and then carefully snuck out of the house while her mother was cleaning up after lunch. If she was lucky, her mother would be so caught up in her usual afternoon routine of maintenance, study and prayer that she would forget to check up on Sal for hours. 

It was cold outside, an icy breeze cut right through all her layers of jackets and scarves and the ground crunched under her thickly booted feet, but Sal just used that as inspiration to stride across the empty paddocks more quickly. The granary was bigger than she remembered once she got right up to it, but her small hands had no problems climbing the short maintenance ladder leading to the viewing window partway up the side and she could make out some promising looking hand holds above it. There were security programs and alarms to prevent unauthorised access and fulfil various health and safety regulations, but it didn't take long to find the access pad and figure out how to disable them. Sal had gotten halfway up before she started to feel any sense of vertigo, and was feeling pretty proud of her ingenuity until she missed the hand hold she was reaching for and suddenly found herself flailing at the smooth surface of the granary wall with nothing to grab onto. She carefully shifted her feet across the girder she was standing on, reaching blindly until her hand found something to hold onto. The wind shifted and in a panic she put her weight on whatever it was, only to feel her hand slip into some sort of pipe. She could feel a slight vacuum from within the tubing, it was probably an intake pipe for the air purifiers that kept the grain clean through the long winter. 

To begin with she wasn't too worried, the gentle pressure of the air made her skin tingle but she felt sure that with a few good tugs she'd be able to get free. It took her a while to come to terms with the fact that she was really stuck. After a few minutes she started to lose feeling in her fingertips and the edge of the tube started to cut into her skin, plus her legs were getting tired from standing still in the same slightly awkward position. It was cold on the roof, cold and lonely. She'd hoped to get a good view of the farm but all she could see from where she was trapped was the grey snowy mush of the nearest paddock, the cows that usually lived there all safely tucked up in their barn or sold for meat. At first she was too afraid to call out for help, and then too proud, but eventually the pain got too great and she gave in, calling as loudly as she could across the barren emptiness between her and the main house. 

By the time her mother found her Sal had gone hoarse from screaming for help and the blunt plastic edge of the tube had worked it's way halfway up to her elbow. 

Her mother was furious. "What were you doing up there?" she shouted, once Sal was safely on the ground and wrapped up in blankets and medical gel. Sal's father was standing silently in the corner, lost for words, his face pale beneath the neat black tangle of his beard. He'd only just arrived home.

"I wanted to see the view from the roof," Sal sniffed. "I won't do it again!"

"No you won't! But to risk your life doing something so dangerous, didn't we raise you better than that? _Nobody_ goes up onto the granary, that's what the maintenance droids are for!"

" _You_ climbed up there," Sal replied petulantly. 

"To save _you_ ," her father replied, his voice hoarse. Sal had to look away from the accusation in his eyes. A cold voice in her head pointed out that she could have _gotten her mother killed_. Sal immediately wanted to hug her mother and apologise, but her mother wasn't done yelling.

"Exactly! It is one thing to risk your life for good reason. But because you were _bored_? Do you value yourself so little?"

"No, mama." said Sal. "I'm sorry, I just..." She started to cry.

Her mother sighed in exasperation. "Rest," she said, gently. "I think you have learned your lesson. And you will have quite the scar to remind you not to be so foolish in future." She kissed Sal on the forehead and wiped her eyes. 

Her father came up and patted her good hand. "You are usually a good, smart girl, Salma," he said. "Perhaps we have not given you enough to do in the wintertime, it must be very dull for you." 

Sal had the horrible feeling that this meant more chores. And she was right. 

But within a few months it was summer, and Sal had plenty of other things to keep her occupied. School had started again, her arm had healed apart from a large scar circling her forearm, and her parents had saved up to buy her a brand new omnitool, one able to interface with off world and even alien data, not just the local network. She loved it. 

As Sal got older she started to love her scar too. It made her look pretty badass, in her opinion, and it didn't take much to spin the story of it's acquisition into a thrilling near death experience to impress boys and generally keep her classmates in awe. For a long time it was the main thing she was known for, that and being the best in the class at anything technical. 

She never forgot the feeling of being trapped on the roof, slowly being swallowed by a mindless machine. It made her both more and less cautious than her classmates: she knew what extreme pain was like, and that she could survive it, but she was a little less certain of her own invulnerability than most children her age. 

By the time she was 17 there was noone left alive who knew why she had the scar, and most people didn't even notice it amongst all the others. Or perhaps they were afraid to ask. 

By the time she was 30, it was gone.

* * *

This had to be a dream. Maybe one of those hallucinations you heard about people experiencing before death. There was certainly plenty of white light, and a mysterious voice, and it only stood to reason that Sal's subconscious wouldn't be able to construct an imaginary afterlife without including some random mooks trying to kill her.

Of course, just because she was delusional didn't mean she wasn't in danger. Lacking any better options, it was probably a good idea to treat the delusion as real until she could figure out what was going on.

Sal's memory of events leading up to being comatose in this strange lab was frustratingly patchy. The lab itself was definitely unfamiliar, the equipment was a mixture of generic med tech and weird advanced looking machinery she'd never seen before. But before that...she could remember the Normandy being under attack, and rushing to try and save Joker, but then it was all darkness and pain followed by unfamiliar faces and the sense that there was something horribly wrong with her skin. Her body still felt _off_ somehow, like her organs were all out of alignment, and the fuzziness in her brain was accompanied by a deep sense of unease. Perhaps she'd been drugged, though that wouldn't explain what was up with her lungs. She kept waiting for the slight catch of the synthetic air bulbs as they filled each time she took a breath, but it never came. 

Sal took a moment away from shooting at the endless security droids coming through the doorway to have a proper look at her reflection in the shiny surface of a nearby wall. (Really, subconscious, security droids? Not ifrits or zombies? How boring) Her skin appeared to be _glowing_ , orange light spilling out through small cracks in her face like her insides were made out of lava. That was disturbing, though not as disturbing as the vague memory of waking up to a body made out of something artificial and white. She ran her free hand along her chin; the cracks felt smooth and clean, like her skin was a patchwork of prefabricated pieces that didn't quite fit together. The cracks were too narrow to get her fingers into to poke at whatever was causing the glow, but they didn't sting or pull like a normal cut in human skin. Maybe she was a robot of some sort, or a cyborg. It made as much sense as anything else.

Well, at least she was good at shooting things. Better a nightmare about being under attack by mechs than one of those dreams about waking up late for her final year history exam.

* * *

Sal stood in front of the full length mirror in her quarters and ran her strong, uncalloused fingers over the skin of her stomach, smooth and featureless except for those strange orange cracks. She thought back to what had been, for her, the morning of the day before, to seeing the reverence in Kaidan's eyes as he stroked carefully around her scars, kissing the lumpy pinkish ruin of her left breast and tangling his long muscular legs with her shorter mangled ones. What would he think of her now?

She was trying not to think too hard about Kaidan. It hadn't been two days for him, it had been two years, and if he'd listened to a word she'd said during their time together he would have moved on. She'd always said there was no point getting sentimental over a corpse, but she'd never thought she'd be alive to deal with the consequences of her advice when that corpse was _her_. 

Thirteen years ago she would have welcomed this new body, back when she was a self conscious teenager coming to terms with an inside of battlefield synthetic transplants barely held together with cheap military grade plastic surgery. But she had _earned_ those scars, with blood and sacrifice and hard lessons about the inevitability of death, she had survived stupid childhood bravado and batarian slavers and battle after battle in the years since then. Her scars had been a reminder of all that, and she was _damned_ if she was going to be grateful to the people who'd wiped them all away.

You didn't have to spend long talking to Miranda to understand why she thought Sal would be happy with her new body. _There_ was a woman who had no idea what it was like to be forced to face up to your own physical imperfections and embrace them. 

Sal peered at the faint hint of freckles on the flat brown skin above her chest and tried to figure out if she was imagining her skin being lighter. It _had_ been two years since it had seen any sun. She resisted the temptation to pick away at her new skin to see what strange cybernetic "improvements" Cerberus had installed below. She was no medical tech, but from all accounts she'd been dead an awfully long time before Cerberus got to her. Miranda had admitted to cloning those organs Sal had lost back on Mindoir, and whatever Chakwas saw on her scanners Sal had her doubts about how much of her original body was left in this brave new Shepard. But she was stuck with it now, and just like her teenaged self she was going to have to suck it up and get used to the body she'd been given.

She took one last look at her perfect alien body with it's round breasts and cracked, shining skin and started to put back on her uniform. Cerberus built or not, this was her body, her ship, and her mission. She'd have new scars to remember her battles by soon enough.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shepard and Garrus discuss the prison industrial complex after shooting a bunch of bad guys.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that I've gotten into replaying Mass Effect 2 I've been reminded how frustrating I find the limited dialogue options and general tone. It's very cathartic to write Shepard saying what she says in my head, but given how much this is influenced by my own very left/small-l-liberal political views (though Sal and I are _very_ different people) this chapter may not be to everyone's tastes.

The cell block was eerily silent now that all the shooting had stopped. Garrus cautiously stood up, watching for hidden enemies, but their team seemed to be the only living things left in the room. 

Shepard was carefully wiping some blue turian blood off her face, but despite the heat of the battle they'd just won she looked the happiest she had all mission. She'd been irritable the whole time Kyril had been giving them the tour of Purgatory, Garrus almost suspected her of being _glad_ he'd turned on them. Jacob, meanwhile, was carefully reloading his gun with a look of concentration, his eyes flicking from time to time between the various open doorways. Garrus found himself liking Jacob, he had a surprisingly good attitude for a Cerberus employee, and if he hated non-humans he did a pretty good job of hiding it. 

The room was a mess, corpses and exploded mechs all over the place. Garrus started heading towards the thick cell block door that was their only means of escape, and wondered how many prisoners they were going to find behind it. The ones they'd fought in this room had been bad enough, not just because there'd been so many but thanks to the sheer viciousness with which they'd fought. He stepped around the corpse of a batarian guard surrounded by prisoners and noticed that there were _bite marks_ on his face. 

"I may not agree with their methods," he said, "But this prison is making the galaxy a better place."

Shepard walked up to him and patted him on the shoulder. "Oh Garrus I _have_ missed you," she said. "You're so adorably _earnest_."

"Thanks," he muttered. "So, what, you think these scumbags should just be let out onto the street? I didn't see you trying to make friends with any of them."

" _These_ scumbags?" said Shepard, lightly kicking a nearby corpse. "Nah. Not a lot of cuddly teddy bears in supermax. And while some of the creeps we met on the walk over might do better in a psych ward there's no doubting that they're a danger to society. But how many political dissidents you think the batarians have locked up in here to avoid making them into martyrs? How many governments you think would be happy to pay Kyril to take various _undesirable elements_ off their hands?" She gestured towards the cells, now open, their occupants dead. "Kyril's a smart guy, he's not going to put the oppressed masses out on public display, but I'll bet if we dug into the bowels of this place we'd find a whole flotilla's worth of Quarians whose only crime was getting on the nerves of some jumped up security guard with nothing better to do."

"I'm not sure if you're being idealistic or really cynical," said Garrus. Shepard flashed him a grin. Yeah, he'd missed her too. This was the first chance he'd had to be out in the field with her since she'd come back, he still couldn't believe it was real. He'd mourned her every day for two years, especially once he was alone on Omega with nothing to distract him from his thoughts. And now here she was, same as ever. Well, close enough.

Jacob finishing gathering spare ammunition and walked up to meet them at the door. "I'm with Shepard," he said. "Not sure how much you'd know about human history, but a couple of hundred years ago, it'd be me and her being locked up in here, just cos of the colour of our skin. Maybe if Kyril wasn't such an opportunistic bastard this place could do some good, but if he's willing to lock up _Shepard_ I have some doubts as to his integrity."

"Maybe," said Garrus, reluctantly. He didn't know much about human history, and all the various brownish shades of human skin looked much the same to him, but he'd seen more bigoted cops than he'd like to admit when he was working at C-sec. "But that's an issue with whatever court is incarcerating innocent people, not with the prison that takes them."

Shepard shrugged. "I didn't say this place was making things any worse. I just said it wasn't making things any better."

"Ok, I'm going to come down on the side of you being cynical," said Garrus. 

"I prefer the term _realistic_ ," said Shepard. She gave a smile so predatory it was almost turian and cocked her gun before reaching her hand towards the opening switch on the door. "Now let's go show Kyril the flaw in his investment plans."


End file.
